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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7425732" data-attributes="member: 37579">...To be utterly and brutally frank: well, duh. Those two break every game. Pathfinder? Optional rules and/or powergaming break it. 4th Edition D&D. Also broken by house rules and some decent min-maxing. FFG's Star Wars? Same thing.The baseline is not based around optimised play. It is deliberately and purposely based two steps below. Because not everyone is an optimiser and basing the power level around powergamers makes the game unplayable for 90% of the audience. And because if you do base the math around optimizers, you're also denying those people the ability to be better than the norm, as the whole point of powergaming is being better. Nobody wins with that route.If you're incorporating optional content—which enables power gaming—the DM either needs to be comfortable with their party steamrolling over every challenge or needs to bend the rules and present harder challenges. That's just a simple fact of gaming, be you playing 5e and allowing optional rules like feats, or playing Pathfinder and allowing optional content like splatbooks, or even playing Settlers of Catan and allowing optional expansions. As for the expected 6-8 encounters per day... That was just a number they pulled from their ass. Completely arbitrary. Because... any number used to balance that was going to be arbitrary. There is no baseline because every adventure and group and campaign is different. The number of encounters in a dungeon crawl is completely and totally different than an overland sandbox which is different from a political game in an urban environment. But they had to pick some number and going high is easier, because it's always simpler to have fewer harder encounters then basing the game around 3-4 encounters and trying to make many easy encounters effective.</blockquote>

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